Stu Miniman, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down with well-known industry vet Paula Long, cofounder and CEO DataGravity, Inc., to find out her take on VMworld 2015 versus 2014.

“I see a lot of refinement of ideas that came out last year,” she said. “I also see a lot of twists, such as, ‘I can make your I/O run faster than he can.’ I also see a lot of security.”

ClearSky Data is generating a lot of buzz this year. Long explained the company’s offerings. “As people think to go to the cloud, there are a few things that cause them to pause: performance, security and cost,” Long, who sits on the ClearSky board, said. “ClearSky addresses all of those. They’ve created sort of a shock absorber to the cloud: a way to use public cloud economics for on-premises performance. I think you’re going to see them get a piece of the market.”

Protecting and leveraging data

DataGravity, a new company launched not long before VMworld 2014, focuses on security for its clients.

“One hundred percent of our customers are finding issues in their data,” she said. “They’re finding credit card numbers, IP addresses; they’re finding things in their data that they need to be protected against. And they’re finding that they don’t know how it got there and who accessed it. DataGravity puts information into the power of the end user and the IT person so they can protect their data and leverage it.”

Especially considering the widely publicized data breaches, Long said that nearly every customer has either talked about or is worried about security. Now, data loss is a “resume-generating event,” she said.

Long continues to root for the startups. “We’re pushing innovation and pushing each other to do new and interesting things,” she said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE